Monday, February 1, 2016

Speedy: The Comic Figure of the Average Man

By Phillip Lopate

In his memoir, An American Comedy (cowritten with Wesley W.
Stout), Harold Lloyd asserts that while growing up “I was average and
typical of the time and place.” He continues: “Supposing Atlantic City
had been holding Average American Boy contests, with beauty waived, I
might have been Master America most any year between 1893 and 1910.”
This insistence was not random; it suited someone who doggedly set out
to create a type on-screen as close as he could make it to an average
specimen—a mirror image of the American audience. The fact that the man
who said this was anything but average, a brilliantly gifted physical
performer with a genius for constructing comic gags, who moreover
understood the film medium with greater sophistication than all but a
handful of his peers, speaks to both his modesty and his vanity. It also
approaches the mystery of why audiences today may find it harder to
connect with Harold Lloyd than they do with, say, Charlie Chaplin or
Buster Keaton. He embodied the spirit of the American dream that any
average individual with gumption could attain success, an ideal that
still seemed within reach in the twenties, before the Depression,
Vietnam, and national disenchantment.

Chaplin flirted perennially
with pathos, Keaton with melancholy, while Lloyd went his merry way,
positive thinking and triumphant. “It’s the optimism,” wrote his
defender Richard Griffith, “which chiefly sticks in the highbrow craw
and accounts for the continued fundamental lack of interest in him and
the continued rating of him below Chaplin, Keaton, and even [Harry]
Langdon. Weltschmerz is hard to find in him . . .” And not just
world-sorrow, but alienation of any sort. David Thomson gets it right,
as usual: “Early clowns are all outsiders, men incapable of, or
uninterested in, society’s scale of merit. Chaplin admits the scale but
criticizes it. Langdon never notices it. Keaton is bewildered by it, the
Marx Brothers know it is a lie, Laurel and Hardy believe it will never
come their way. But Lloyd became the least deviant of comedians, a man
who never dreamed of being out of the ordinary.” Still, this judgment
needs to be complicated, because only a profoundly and uniquely
imaginative artist—by definition, an outsider—can take on his shoulders
the burden of synthesizing the entire society around him and fashioning
an archetype from it that will play in Peoria. A lack of deviancy,
moreover, does not account for the sheer inventiveness and pleasure that
can still be found in abundance in Lloyd’s films, particularly his four
best features, Grandma’s Boy (1922), Safety Last! (1923), The Freshman (1925), and Speedy (1928).

As good a place to start as any is Speedy.
The title alone tips off Lloyd’s comic approach, which is to keep up a
pace so rapid that no lingering sentimentality or sadness can attach.
Fittingly, the film is set in New York City, where, the opening titles
tell us, everyone is in such a rush. Whether or not the expression “a
New York minute” was yet current, the idea that the city represented the
forefront of hectic modernity already held sway. We see establishing
shots of trains, tugboats, crowds all hurtling by. Eventually, we are
brought to a slower neighborhood, where the most gradual and archaic of
conveyances is introduced: a horse-drawn streetcar, driven by Pop Dillon
(Bert Woodruff), the grandfather of Lloyd’s love interest, Jane (played
winningly by Ann Christy).

At a very basic level, the film is
about modes of transport, and its rhythm is largely dictated by many
shots of people rushing via taxi, subway, streetcar, and motorcycle. It
is also about an older way of being, a more traditionally communal,
unhurried morality, in conflict with the new, headlong corporate
capitalism that sprang up in the Gilded Age with the railroad barons and
now seemed well-nigh unstoppable. The plot hinges, in fact, on a
villainous railroad company that seeks to drive the old horsecar line
out of business and take over its tracks.

The protagonist, also
named Harold, and nicknamed Speedy, would appear to be in harmony with
this burgeoning capitalist ethos: he is ambitious and in a hurry to
succeed, the very prototype of “the aggressive bourgeois ego which
George Santayana saw emerge in the industrializing U.S.—the go-getting
American with no higher aim than diligent imitation of the rich . . .”
(Pankaj Mishra). But because he is in love with Jane, and she with him,
he ends up allying with Pop Dillon and his elderly neighbor-friends
against the big shots. Lloyd’s character may be a go-getter, but he is
also fundamentally decent and in sympathy with the little guys—his
coworkers at the soda fountain and the small shopkeepers who come to his
aid when the railroad company tries to seize the horsecar. A full-scale
donnybrook occurs between the neighborhood geezers and the railroad
thugs, and the point of it is that our hero needs all the help he can
get from the People. A veteran uses a peg leg to his advantage. A
Chinese laundryman applies his hot iron to the seats of the bad guys.
(There is also a loyal dog that keeps coming to Speedy’s aid.) A sort of
popular-front politics can be read into these scenes, which if nothing
else celebrate the enduring values of neighborhood diversity and local
community against the impersonal globalizing corporation.

Speedy
is an urban variant of the “boy with the glasses” character that Lloyd
had been painstakingly refining for years (and that very nickname had
been used earlier for The Freshman’s protagonist). Lloyd had
stumbled on the idea of giving his character a pair of horn-rimmed
spectacles (lensless, since glass would becloud the eyes’ expression).
The glasses were meant to signify a nerdy milquetoast type, from whom
one would not expect much derring-do, and who would therefore pleasantly
surprise the audience when he rose to heroic challenges. Speedy is
given a few other characteristics, such as being unable to hold down a
job because he is so obsessed with the Yankees (the cameo featuring a
game Babe Ruth, who gets bounced around in Speedy’s cab, is a nice
little eye-opener). But in general, we are asked to accept that Speedy
is simply Youth in its most healthy, energetic, and accident-prone form.

Lloyd divided his movies into “character pictures” and “gag pictures”: The former, like Grandma’s Boy, took longer to set up the plot and had more psychological shadings. Speedy
is decidedly a gag picture: the pace alone, with its wealth of sight
jokes, dictated that there would not be enough time for much character
development. In various sections, such as the long taxi-driving
sequence, the gags flow outrageously yet organically into each other.
“Lloyd was outstanding even among the master craftsmen at setting up a
gag clearly, culminating and getting out of it deftly, and linking it
smoothly to the next,” wrote James Agee. One extended sequence, Speedy’s
date with Jane at Coney Island, may suffice as example.

It begins
in the subway, with much pushing and shoving. In his memoir, Lloyd
quips: “The Subway is a comedy all by itself, except to those who have
to ride in it.” Again, we are treated to an ethnically and
physiognomically diverse batch of New York humanity. Speedy contrives to
get seats for his girl and himself by a trick involving a dollar bill
on a string, which he dangles before a seated passenger to entice him to
stand, then pulls away. A bit shady, unfair, not entirely what you’d
expect from the supposedly proper Speedy, but—entrepreneurial, shall we
say. At Luna Park, Speedy is the height of fatuous self-content, with
his loving girl beside him and a week’s wages in his pocket, and a new
white suit that makes him feel dressed for success. It does not take
long for the suit to be marred, first by an overfriendly dog whose paws
deface his trousers, then by his leaning against a freshly painted
fence. Passersby laugh at the black bars on his jacket, and he has no
idea why until he turns around and sees the pattern in a fun-house
mirror. Next he passes a fish stand, and a crab lands in his pocket,
leading to a set of mishaps in which the crab pinches ladies’ behinds
and, in one case, steals a nightgown from a handbag. The women slap
Speedy, thinking him a deviant masher, and he reacts with astonishment
and self-righteousness. The humor here flows from the Lloyd character’s
thinking he is an utterly normal, upstanding citizen, while those in his
vicinity view him as a pervert. Here I am making the case that Lloyd’s
comedy derives precisely from challenging his character’s assumptions of
being the quintessence of average and normal.

Lloyd was a
veteran of one- and two-reel comedies made for producer Hal Roach (Mack
Sennett’s rival). It was a school that taught him to brainstorm ideas
with story and gag writers but never to work from finished scripts,
instead trusting to improvisation and inspiration on location for
building elaborations on a gag onto a comic bit. “Our lack of method is
deplorable, but somehow it works,” he testified. While he often directed
parts of his pictures, he omitted taking directorial credit, preferring
to help out the ex–gag writer designated for that job and perhaps
feeling it was sufficient that the public knew the film reflected his
own comic vision. Ted Wilde is listed as the director of Speedy,
but the whole notion of auteurism seems a little spurious when it comes
to silent comedy. By whatever collaborations the film came about, the
result hangs together as a fresh, kinetic, fast-moving affair. The Coney
Island sequence, for instance, has some beautiful cutaways to the
fairway at night, some surreal dream swirls when Speedy and Jane are
trying out every punishing ride, and a hysterical fantasy shot of twin
babies with Harold-like spectacles riding in the moving van driving the
couple home, which they pretend is their future abode.

By the
film’s conclusion, Speedy has gotten his girl by saving Pop Dillon’s
horsecar business, and all ends happily. In an interview with Lloyd long
after he retired (he did not self-destruct, like many other silent film
stars, but was a business-shrewd steward of his heritage), he was asked
to compare Chaplin’s Tramp to his boy with glasses. “Well, Charlie
generally had to play the losing lover because his character was the
Little Tramp—who was a little grotesque. If he won the girl, she
generally had to be off beat, a little screwy . . . But with this
boy-with-the-glasses character—that was one of his virtues: he wore
ordinary clothes, the same as the boy next door. He was somebody you’d
pass on the street—and therefore his romances were believable. And I
would say that I got the girl most every time. Generally, in many of
Charlie’s pictures, he walked down the road at the end, which had its own virtue.”

We
see in this passage Lloyd’s evenhanded sense of perspective, though his
penultimate statement about getting the girl might strike some nowadays
as a little smug. Still, as he said, each—Chaplin’s final saddening
aloneness and his own cheerful romantic triumph—has its place. And Lloyd
had a purer sense than most of what it meant to keep audiences
laughing. He was a profound student of the art of comedy, as well as one
of its most ebullient practitioners.

Phillip Lopate’s most recent books are Portrait Inside My Head and To Show and to Tell. He directs the nonfiction program at Columbia University.